Manage a shared budget across campaigns

In AdWords, you can assign a daily budget to each individual campaign, or use shared budgets to allocate budget across multiple campaigns. A shared budget is ideal if you don't have a lot of time to spend setting up and monitoring individual campaign budgets, but would still like to get the most clicks possible for your ads within a set budget. Shared budgets don’t work with Video campaigns, campaigns that are part of a campaign group, and campaigns that are part of an experiment.

When a shared budget is in use, AdWords can automatically adjust how budget is allocated across different campaigns to help you improve your return-on-investment.You can always switch back to using individual campaign budgets for full control over how much you spend per campaign. Go to the Shared library in your account to set up or manage your shared budget.

Example

Say you've set aside $100 per day, split evenly between two campaigns. On a given day, one campaign could get less impressions and clicks than usual, resulting in only $40 spent. With a shared budget, AdWords could take that leftover $10 and reallocate it to the second campaign to maximize your campaign results overall.

Set up a shared budget

Name your new shared budget, select some campaigns to apply it to, and set a budget amount.

Click Save.

The budget won't take effect until you apply it to individual campaigns. In the Budgets table, click the name of the budget you want to apply, then click the Apply to campaigns button.

You can always edit your shared budget by coming back to the Shared library.

Remove a shared budget

Because every AdWords campaign has to have a budget, you can only remove a shared budget if it's not currently being used by any campaigns.

Follow these steps to remove a shared budget from your campaigns and remove it:

Select the Campaigns tab.

Click the Shared library link in the left navigation bar.

Beneath that link, click Budgets.

Click the name of the budget you want to remove.

Click the campaign names that are using the shared budget.

On each campaign's Settings tab, click Edit in the "Budget" section.

Select Individual budget.

Click Save.

Repeat the steps above for each campaign using the shared budget.

In the Budgets section of the Shared library, select the budget you'd like to remove.

Click Remove.

Switching budgets midday

If you switch from an individual campaign to a shared budget or vice versa in the middle of the day, we will start serving from the time you switch, as though the campaigns have spent $0 up until that point.

Example

Let's say you have 4 campaigns, each with an individual budget of $6. By 3:00pm, each of these campaigns has spent their full $6. At 4:00pm, you decide to create a new shared budget of $24 for those four campaigns. We will start your $24 shared budget from $0, as if the $6 campaigns had not already served.